| After getting another batch of bounce messages from Microsoft's Postmaster, | I have reluctantly decided to filter out all messages from Microsoft.com | until they fix this problem with Microsoft Exchange. I'm not in the Exchange group, not the internal operations group responsible for this last error, but I'll try to clarify the two issues raised by this thread. (But perhaps this message was pointless, as the folks I'm attempting to explain to have already this filtered out by their KILL file?) MSMail and Exchange started before MIME started. They wanted to have "richer" email (as with MIME), and started some efforts, which put data in a uuencoded WINMAIL.DAT file. Exchange switched from TNEF (Transport Neutral something or another) to MIME. Originally the default was to send "rich" email but after beta feedback came in, it was changed to NOT be the default. So, these winmail.dat and MIME (and some TNEF) data included in some messages are from MSMail and Exchange clients. And while I expect that there are some things that our MS Mail and Exchange groups could have done better to introduce support for more than just ASCII messages, there is also some user education needed (that some forums -- such as mailing lists and newsgroups) often aren't the right place to post non-ASCII text like MIME attachments and older winmail.dat files. Another issue (the one mentioned in the above message). Last week the mail server operations group on Microsoft campus experienced a few "growing pains" switching over to later builds of Exchange server, switching over from MS Mail. Apparently there were some brief problems, causing some bounce messages, which would have manifested from a few users @microsoft.com. I don't know if it due to humans (operations group error) or computers (Exchange server bug) that caused it. The flurry of bounces was [hopefully] a one-time problem. Lee Fisher, leefi@microsoft.com